Jesse L. Greenstein
1909–2002

Jesse L. Greenstein, the DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics, Emeritus, died last October 21, three days after falling and breaking his hip. He was 93.

Greenstein grew up in New York City in a family that encouraged his scientific interests. He entered Harvard at the age of 16, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1929 and master’s in 1930, and (after a stint in his family’s real estate and finance business during the Depression) his PhD in 1937, with a thesis on interstellar dust.

It was as a 16-year-old undergraduate at Harvard that he met his wife, Naomi, who died earlier last year after a marriage of 68 years. At the memorial service in Dabney Lounge February 11, Professor of Astronomy Anneila Sargent, who presided, noted that “we’re here to combine our memories to make a lasting picture of a remarkable man and a remarkable life.” And, she added, “It’s hard for many of us in this room to say just ‘Jesse’; it’s often Jesse and Naomi.”

After Harvard, Greenstein joined the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, first as a postdoc and after 1939 as a member of the astrophysics faculty. When he came to Caltech in 1948
to organize a new graduate program in optical astronomy in conjunction with the new 200-inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, he brought a lot of Yerkes with him. At the memorial service, Donald Osterbrock, now professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, recalled “how he was a product of his 11 years at Yerkes Observatory.” Greenstein built the Caltech department, mostly out of Yerkes PhDs, one of whom was Osterbrock, who came in 1953. “Jesse was my first boss . . .Best boss I ever had,” he said.

Osterbrock illustrated his remarks with slides of meetings and conferences from the ’30s and ’40s showing the young Greenstein with most of the great names in early 20th-century astronomy. “As a young student, postdoc, and junior astronomer, Jesse was inspired by all those research scientists, but in his turn, he inspired a whole new generation of outstanding research astronomers and astrophysicists here at Caltech,” he said.

Robert Kraft, who, like Osterbrock, is professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, surveyed briefly Greenstein’s lifetime of work (“just about everything in astrophysics”), published in more than 400 papers. This work ranged from his initial interests at Harvard to his turn toward high-resolution stellar spectroscopy at Yerkes, the famous project from 1957 to 1970 on abundances of the elements, and later, after he “retired,” his study of white dwarfs. Kraft noted Greenstein’s generosity on the issue of author order on papers: “In most of the abundance papers, Jesse is almost always not the first author; he generally stepped aside, permitting his younger colleagues to have their place in the sun.

“Jesse was one of the great figures of American astronomy in the 20th century,” said Kraft, who, as a Mount Wilson observer in the ’50s and’60s, had “family status” at Caltech during what Kraft referred to as the “famous days of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories.”

Jerry Wasserburg, the MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus, recalled meeting the Greensteins in 1955 when he was a new assistant professor. “The hospitality in the Greenstein home was fabulous,” he said, with both Jesse and Naomi offering a “liberal education to us technocratic characters to improve our view of life”—an education in things like art and wine.

Lunches at the Athenaeum also remained firmly in Wasserburg’s memory—Greenstein’s elegant Schimmelpfennig cigarillos and Willy Fowler’s cheap mentholated cigars; Greenstein turning over the placemats: “He would pull a pen out from his vest immediately upon any argument and cover the placemat with incisive calculations, where numbers in many powers of 10 would appear and disappear in some wonderful juggle. And you were trying to follow it from across the table.”

Wasserburg mentioned Greenstein’s view of the famous paper on element abundances by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle, popularly known as B2FH: “The B2FH business was full of conflicts for Jesse. He knew and thought this was all-important, and he was a big supporter and contributor to that effort. But having a bunch of nuclear physicists who did not know any real astronomy say where the elements came from, which he had been measuring, while he was trying to measure them and at the same time trying to educate these nuclear physics savages into real astronomy, was painful to him.”

Besides nuclear physics, Greenstein was also interested in radio astronomy. Marshall Cohen, professor of astronomy, emeritus, who joined the Caltech faculty in 1968, noted that Greenstein wrote a paper on radio astronomy in 1937 while he was a grad student at Harvard, in the days when most optical astronomers were indifferent to the field. This changed, said Cohen, in 1951, when a compact radio source was first identified with a distant galaxy. “This excited Jesse, and he began to lobby the Caltech administration to set up a radio astronomy program,” he said.

“Jesse organized the famous conference at the Carnegie Institution in Washington,
in January 1954,” recounted Cohen. “That meeting catalyzed the founding of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. OVRO was dedicated in 1958 and quickly became one of the premier institutions in the country.”

Greenstein also played a part in the discovery of quasars. Maarten Schmidt, the Moseley Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, recalled the fateful afternoon exactly 40 years ago when he suddenly discovered that the spectrum of a radio star, 3C273, showed a redshift of 16 percent. “I was stunned,” he remembered. “Could this bright star really be at a distance of a billion light-years? Pacing back and forth, I saw Jesse in the hallway and told him what had happened. After a while Jesse got his observations on 3C48 [the first discovered radio star], and in 10 or 15 minutes, we succeeded in finding that it had a redshift of 37 percent. We made so much noise in discussing the consequences that Bev Oke came in to find out what was happening. We tried to find alternative explanations that would not require a redshift at all, but we failed. By the end of the day, the three of us were off to the Greenstein house, where Naomi was astounded when we all had a stiff drink. That was the beginning of quasars in astronomy.”

About the article they subsequently wrote, Schmidt said, “Some of the parts Jesse wrote are breathtaking, even to me. . . . I think it was probably the most exciting scientific venture in his life.”
Radio astronomer Anneila Sargent, who had been a graduate student during Greenstein’s reign, pointed out that he was “way before his time” in bringing in female grad students. “There were more women in astronomy by percentage than in most of the other divisions at Caltech. Jesse was often teased about it,” she said. She was also Greenstein’s research assistant for a number of years and collaborated on his 300th paper. Sargent is a past president of the American Astronomical Society, as are Osterbrock, Kraft, and Schmidt.

Greenstein also loved music and art. His younger son, Peter, spoke at the memorial of growing up in a household filled with all kinds of classical music, but “in the latter part of my father’s life, he narrowed his interests down to chamber music, lieder, and opera,” he said. He admired the string quartets of Hayden, Mozart, and Schubert, but reserved his highest reverence for those of Beethoven, especially the last quartets. Peter then introduced a quartet of string players, who performed the Cavatina movement of Beethoven’s Quartet no. 13, op. 130. His brother, George, noted later that this movement is included on a disk headed for space aboard Voyager 1 (see page 17).

Greenstein owned an extensive collection of Japanese paintings and prints and was a member of the board of trustees of Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum. David Kamansky, director of that museum, spoke of how they had become fast friends through their mutual interest in Japanese painting. Greenstein gave most of the collection that was displayed in his home to the Pacific Asia Museum when he and his wife moved into a retirement home with far less wall space.

“The final gift of paintings from Jesse, his favorite ones, was given only a few months before his death,” said Kamansky. “He’d kept them to enjoy, under his bed, where he would take them out for anyone interested in seeing and talking about them. He told me he enjoyed them for many years, but now it was time to place them in the public trust, where they would be enjoyed by generations to come and studied and learned from.”

Kamansky noted a particularly favorite painting of Greenstein’s. “The signature says ‘Katsushika Hokusai, an old man mad about painting.’ And I think of Jesse in the same way.”

Elder son George Greenstein, also an astrophysicist, remembered his mother’s Playreaders, a group she helped found, and noted that astronomy played only a walk-on role in the Greenstein home: “It made just brief appearances in the family life. It was certainly important, but maybe not that important.”

George Greenstein said that his father “loved observing. It’s very sad nowadays that people don’t really observe.” And he quoted something his father had written about astronomical observing: “This is not a normal way of life. Very few people in the world do the same thing, but for all my unknown colleagues in some other dawn on another mountain, thoughts will be similar. There is a deep content at having been awake with the universe, at watching the faint glow of some part of it. Possibly I have tonight even asked it an important question.”

He also remembered a question he had asked his father very late in his life about a “dirty little secret of science”: “What do you do if you just can’t do it, if you don’t know how to solve that problem? And what he said, very quietly and peacefully, was, ‘I always knew I could do it.’”

Granddaughter Ilana Greenstein recalled a number of anecdotes of the grandfather she had gotten to know well only as a teenager, having grown up on the opposite coast. “Jesse lived his life in a state of constant anxiety, constant friction, constant discontent,” she remembered. “He was a dark, complicated, dazzling person, but there was a sweetness to him.”

She talked about the last time she saw him, last July, when, uncharacteristically, “he didn’t seem to need time to rest. And it was the first time I had ever seen Jesse at peace. He wasn’t worried; he wasn’t anxious; didn’t have any interest at all in the things that had always dominated his conversation before. He didn’t want to talk about politics or the stock market or the space-time continuum or his memories of the past. He just lay back on his pillows, smiling and relaxed, and all he wanted was to hear us talk. He seemed to be happy, happy to be fading out of the world, secure in the knowledge that it would spin on in all of its joy and mystery without him. He looked contented for the first time I can remember.” —JD